The paper introduces the concept of Language Specific Knowledge (LSK), showing that multilingual language models can answer certain queries better when prompted in a language other than English, sometimes even in low‑resource languages. It defines a language‑selection problem and presents several baseline methods, including the authors’ LSKExtractor, to empirically demonstrate that choosing the optimal language can improve question‑answering performance across datasets covering cultural and social norms. Experiments reveal non‑intuitive mappings, such as Gemma models excelling on Chinese and Middle Eastern topics in Spanish and Qwen models performing best on authority and responsibility queries in Arabic and Chinese.
By Ishika Agarwal, Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
The paper investigates cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) by introducing the Culture-Related Open Questions (CROQ) dataset, which contains 24‑language questions about generic culture. Experiments reveal that LLMs disproportionately favor Japan in their responses, especially when prompted in high‑resource languages, while low‑resource languages tend to highlight countries where the language is official. The study also finds that these biases emerge after supervised fine‑tuning rather than during pre‑training.
By Joseba Fernandez de Landa, Carla Perez-Almendros, Jose Camacho-Collados
Quiz rooms, trivia nights, and quiz shows challenge human knowledge across a wide range of topics, from canonical facts to everyday culture. In this paper, we examine whether large language models (LLMs) can perform competitively in such settings, using quiz-style questions to test them on both common and niche topics.
The paper introduces MAPLE, a family of decoder‑only language models pretrained with document‑level geographic metadata such as source URL, country, and continent. MAPLE is evaluated on a new benchmark, LocalNewsQA, which tests whether models can switch answers when the locale changes. Experiments show that, with inference‑time metadata fixed, MAPLE outperforms metadata‑free controls in both answer switching and accuracy on locale‑dependent questions, and these gains grow with model size.
By Anjishnu Mukherjee, Ziwei Zhu, Antonios Anastasopoulos
arXiv:2610.00606v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Language Models increasingly serve as interfaces for knowledge-intensive information seeking tasks across languages by synthesizing multilingua...
By Dayeon Ki, Ruochen Zhang, Silviu Cucerzan, Ryen W. White, Ning Gao
arXiv:2607. 06327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty estimation (UE) enables LLM-powered systems to recognize when to abstain, yet existing research has predominantly focused on English.
By Andrea Alfarano, Andrea Bacciu, Saab Mansour, Amin Mantrach, Marcello Federico